A great joy – and privilege – in life is deciding you want to cook something new. To learn a new recipe and taste some new flavours. If I have a day that has seemed long, stressful and arduous, the prospect of cooking something new is like the feeling you get when you wake up really early to go on holiday.
But in my eyes, there’s a right way to do it. Walk to your kitchen or your bookshelf or wherever you keep your books, brush your fingers along the shelves and stop at the recipe book you fancy exploring.
Pull it down, open it up and start perusing the pages. Flick all the way through until you find a recipe you like the look of. Let yourself be swept away by the mouth-watering images of oozing pies, steaming stews and glorious roast dishes. Stop at the lists of ingredients that get your taste buds exploding. Before you settle on a recipe, there’s one more step you must take.
Hurry to your kitchen cupboards and check what you have on the shelves. What’s in the fridge? Do you have enough of the listed ingredients to make it work? Are you missing a vital element?
As long as you decide your cupboards are sufficiently stocked to meet your needs, then you can make your final decision. What will you cook?
Recipe books I love:
This is certainly not an exhaustive list – these are just the recipe books I’ve come across and especially love. Most of them belong to my mum or my nan.
I originally bought this recipe book as a present for my mum although I ended up using it more often than her. I love it for – as always – the glorious photos of delicious ingredients all piled into one roasting tin, and for the easiness of the recipes. In most cases, all you have to do is throw everything into a roasting tin, turn the oven on and voila, you have a great meal. At worst you have to chop up a few veggies.
There are so many roast recipes, from fish, chicken and veggie feasts to full-on roast dinners, pasta dishes and everything you can do with roasted fruit.
Mum has the Deliciously Ella cookbook where Ella herself is on the cover with some spaghetti – or perhaps courgette, it’s hard to tell.
Ella is gluten-free and vegan, a decision she made after being diagnosed with a rare illness called POTS, which essentially breaks down your automatic nervous system. She decided the best way to manage her condition was to change her diet and this excellent book is the result. While I’m neither gluten-free nor vegan I love Deliciously Ella because it doesn’t cut out any of the delicious food you love, it just gives you healthier ways to make it. From gnocchi, pizza and risotto to brownies, stir fry and vegetable lasagna, all the classics are there – just with a twist.
This was one of the books I took with me to university and boy did I appreciate it! Ok, so I did eat far too many takeaways and indulged in dinners of peanut butter on toast, but in between the junk food blow outs I occasionally cooked and Nadiya’s book was my immediate port of call. She teaches you how to make quick yet yummy meals like chicken shawarma and baked bean falafel.
What I also love about this book are her suggestions for turning leftover food into snacks or making the ingredients in your cupboard or fridge go much further than you thought they could.
I love Indian food so a whole recipe book dedicated to the brilliant cuisine had to be included on my favourites list. Rick’s dishes are full to bursting with flavour. Beware, you do need quite a few ingredients to make them but as long as you have plenty of spices, you’re good.
He also uses quite a lot of Greek yoghurt and lime in his recipes and the results are amazing especially the cardamom chicken skewers, fish curry and the creamy dessert Nimish.
